The truth demands our attention, indeed . . .
Amartya Kumar Sen is an Indian economist and philosopher, who since 1972 has taught and worked in India, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Sen has made contributions to welfare economics, social choice theory, economic and social justice, economic theories of famines, and indices of the measure of well-being of citizens of developing countries.
He is currently the Thomas W. Lamont University Professor at Harvard University[4] and member of faculty at Harvard Law School. He is a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge and was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1998 and India's Bharat Ratna in 1999 for his work in welfare economics. In 2017, Sen was awarded the Johan Skytte Prize in Political Science for most valuable contribution to Political Science.
In 2009, Sen published a book called The Idea of Justice. Based on his previous work in welfare economics and social choice theory, but also on his philosophical thoughts, he presented his own theory of justice that he meant to be an alternative to the influential modern theories of justice of John Rawls or John Harsanyi. In opposition to Rawls but also earlier justice theoreticians Immanuel Kant, Jean-Jacques Rousseau or David Hume, and inspired by the philosophical works of Adam Smith and Mary Wollstonecraft, Sen developed a theory that is both comparative and realizations-oriented (instead of being transcendental and institutional). However, he still regards institutions and processes as being important. As an alternative to Rawls's veil of ignorance, Sen chose the thought experiment of an impartial spectator as the basis of his theory of justice. He also stressed the importance of public discussion (understanding democracy in the sense of John Stuart Mill) and a focus on people's capabilities (an approach that he had co-developed), including the notion of universal human rights, in evaluating various states with regard to justice.
His most recent collaboration with Jean Drèze An Uncertain Glory - India and its Contradictions was reviewed in the New York Times Sunday Book Review by Jyoti Thottam on September 6 2013.
In late June, a television reporter named Narayan Pargaien spent three days in the northern Indian state of Uttarakhand to cover the region’s devastating monsoon floods, which have killed more than 5,700 people. Like most journalists covering the disaster, Pargaien dutifully described families who had lost everything, including their modest thatch-roofed homes. Unlike most journalists, Pargaien reported from the scene while perched on the shoulders of a flood victim in the middle of a swollen river. As the outrage poured in, Pargaien tried to explain himself. In an interview with the Indian Web site Newslaundry, he said the man who carried him had insisted upon it. “He was grateful to us and wanted to show me some respect,” Pargaien said, “as it was the first time someone of my level had visited his house.”
The India captured in that image — a preening consumer economy built on the backs of the destitute — is the subject of “An Uncertain Glory,” a new book by the economists Jean Drèze and Amartya Sen that aims to bring the poor to the center of public discussion about the country’s future. It’s an urgent, passionate, political work that makes the case that India cannot move forward without investing significantly — as every other major industrialized country has already done — in public services: “The lack of health care, tolerably good schools and other basic facilities important for human well-being and elementary freedoms, keeps a majority of Indians shackled to their deprived lives in a way quite rarely seen in other self-respecting countries that are trying to move ahead in the world.”
Sen, who won the Nobel in economic science in 1998, and Drèze, his longtime collaborator, begin by retelling the story of India’s recent economic boom. They show that, leaving aside per capita income, which has grown impressively, India is actually falling behind its neighbors in South Asia — never mind America, Europe and China — in every social indicator that matters, from literacy to child malnutrition to access to toilets. The chapter on the country’s woeful schools is a welcome corrective to the idea of India as a nation of brilliant, job-stealing engineers. In fact, large numbers of Indian primary-school students are unable to write a simple sentence or do basic arithmetic. In an alarming chapter on health, Drèze and Sen point out that while the Taliban’s opposition to polio vaccines in Pakistan has rightly created an international furor, there is scant attention paid to India’s dismal rates of child immunization, which are among the lowest in the world, “even without a Taliban.”
These comparisons are rhetorical tools; the authors use them to show that India’s problems can’t be attributed to culture or democracy or a lack of tax revenue. Bangladesh, Nepal and Sri Lanka are all messy, multiparty democracies with deeply conservative religious traditions and legacies of colonial oppression. And yet, with fewer resources, they have made solid progress in improving health and education while India stagnates.
So what’s the problem? According to Drèze and Sen, even though the poor constitute a vast majority of Indian voters, they have been shut out of public discourse. “What a democratic system achieves depends largely on what issues are brought into political engagement,” they write. That’s why “An Uncertain Glory” directs so much of its criticism toward the “celebratory media,” the proliferation of satellite channels and newspapers dominated by breathless gossip about cricketers, billionaires and Bollywood stars and point-scoring among the political elite. The Indian media are not unique in their love of froth and scandal, but the stakes are higher when these news outlets set the agenda for a country with “the largest population of seriously undernourished people in the world.”
As if to prove their point, coverage of the book in India, where it was published in July, has been dominated by the “feud” between Drèze and Sen, champions of the poor, and the economists Jagdish Bhagwati and Arvind Panagariya, co-authors of “Why Growth Matters” and champions of market deregulation, who argue that too much spending on social welfare programs might derail economic growth. But it would be a mistake to read “An Uncertain Glory” as a screed against liberalization. This book is something bigger, a heartfelt plea to rethink what progress in a poor country ought to look like. What difference does it make, the authors ask, to lift millions above some notional poverty line if they still lack the basics of a decent life? That is the paradox at the heart of Katherine Boo’s best seller “Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death and Hope in a Mumbai Slum” — it isn’t simply want of money that makes the slum dwellers of Annawadi miserable; it’s being trapped in a system that’s rigged against them.
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While Drèze and Sen have called for investing in social welfare before, this book comes at a crucial time. Ineffectiveness and corruption plague India’s public sector, but recent data show that when it comes to health and education, outcomes in the private sector are no better. “There is a real need for pragmatism here,” they write, “and to avoid both the crushing inefficiency of market denial . . . and the pathology of ideological marketization.”
In the interest of pragmatism, Drèze and Sen might have devoted more thought to how to make India’s existing social-welfare initiatives work better. They describe successes in a few forward-thinking states, but it is not clear how to replicate those results on a national scale. The section on discrimination against girls — an issue on which Sen is an unquestioned expert — also cries out for a more prescriptive analysis. When even girls’ education seems to have no effect on gender inequality, what’s left?
Still, the value of “An Uncertain Glory” is its wide-angle view. In a sense, Drèze and Sen are playing a role similar to that of Narayan Pargaien’s cameraman. The shot intended for broadcast was supposed to show only the reporter with flood as background — viewers were never meant to see the man beneath him. But the anonymous cameraman pulled back to reveal the big, unflattering picture. Such small acts of conscience can enrich public reasoning enormously; India, as this important book argues, needs many more of them.
This video can be found on the Princeton University Press website, where the book is advertised thus:
When India became independent in 1947 after two centuries of colonial rule, it immediately adopted a firmly democratic political system, with multiple parties, freedom of speech, and extensive political rights. The famines of the British era disappeared, and steady economic growth replaced the economic stagnation of the Raj. The growth of the Indian economy quickened further over the last three decades and became the second fastest among large economies. Despite a recent dip, it is still one of the highest in the world.
Maintaining rapid as well as environmentally sustainable growth remains an important and achievable goal for India. In An Uncertain Glory, two of India's leading economists argue that the country's main problems lie in the lack of attention paid to the essential needs of the people, especially of the poor, and often of women. There have been major failures both to foster participatory growth and to make good use of the public resources generated by economic growth to enhance people's living conditions. There is also a continued inadequacy of social services such as schooling and medical care as well as of physical services such as safe water, electricity, drainage, transportation, and sanitation. In the long run, even the feasibility of high economic growth is threatened by the underdevelopment of social and physical infrastructure and the neglect of human capabilities, in contrast with the Asian approach of simultaneous pursuit of economic growth and human development, as pioneered by Japan, South Korea, and China.
In a democratic system, which India has great reason to value, addressing these failures requires not only significant policy rethinking by the government, but also a clearer public understanding of the abysmal extent of social and economic deprivations in the country. The deep inequalities in Indian society tend to constrict public discussion, confining it largely to the lives and concerns of the relatively affluent. Drèze and Sen present a powerful analysis of these deprivations and inequalities as well as the possibility of change through democratic practice.
Reviews referenced and quoted are set out below include the NYT Book Review included on this page:
"It's an urgent, passionate, political work that makes the case that India cannot move forward without investing significantly--as every other major industrialized country has already done--in public services. . . . This book is . . . a heartfelt plea to rethink what progress in a poor country ought to look like."--Jyoti Thottam, New York Times Book Review
"Sen and Drèze carefully explain such issues as health care, education, corruption, lack of accountability, growing inequality, and their suppression in India's elite-dominated public space. . . . Sen and Drèze also reveal how democracy in its simplest manifestation, the scramble for votes, can drive successful implementation of welfare programs such as the Public Distribution System."--Pankaj Mishra, New York Review of Books
"After three decades of trawling the data compiled by central and state governments, Indian nongovernmental organizations, and international bodies, these longtime collaborators know--possibly better than any other commentators--how Indian governments since the 1980s have failed the vast majority of Indians, especially in health care, education, poverty reduction, and the justice system."--Andrew Robinson, Science
"[A]n excellent but unsettling new book."--The Economist
"[E]legant and restrained prose, and with an array of fresh examples."--Ramachandra Guha, Financial Times
"Sen and Dreze are right to draw attention to the limits of India's success and how much remains to be done. They are exemplary scholars, and everything they say is worth careful study."--Clive Crook, Bloomberg News
"Economists Dreze and Nobel laureate Sen compellingly argue that Indian policy makers have ignored the basic needs of people, especially those of the poor and women."--Choice
"An Uncertain Glory is an excellent, highly readable, and exceptionally meaningful book."--S. Prakash Sethi, Business Ethics Quarterly
Update to controversy! Update to the political strategy of denial! Update to opinion! Is the free expression of opinion becoming fake news?
Amartya Sen was critical of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi when he was announced as the prime ministerial candidate by the BJP. In April 2014, he said that Modi would not make a good Prime Minister. However, later in December 2014 he conceded that Narendra Modi did give people a sense of faith that things can happen.
In May 2007, he was appointed as chairman of Nalanda Mentor Group to examine the framework of international cooperation, and proposed structure of partnership, which would govern the establishment of Nalanda International University Project as an international centre of education seeking to revive the ancient center of higher learning which was present in India from the 5th century to 1197.
On 19 July 2012, Sen was named the first chancellor of the proposed Nalanda University (NU). Teaching began in August 2014. On 20 February 2015, Amartya Sen withdrew his candidature for a second term stating that the Government of India was not keen on him continuing in the post.
Criticism . . .
BusinessToday, New Delhi, Last Updated: July 8, 2018
The lack of attention to social sector has grown exponentially under the incumbent BJP government, said Nobel laureate Amartya Sen. The current dispensation has been diverting attention from the core issues despite evident widespread backwardness in India, the noted economist was quoted as saying in an IANS report. He was discussing his new book 'Bharat Aur Uske Virodhabhas' (India and its Contradictions), which he co-authored with economist Jean Dreze.
"Things have gone pretty badly wrong. Even previously before this government, we did not do enough on education and health. But it has taken a quantum jump in the wrong direction since 2014," Sen said.
Sen pointed out the contradiction of prominent backwardness in India while also being the fastest growing economy in the world. "Twenty years ago, of the six countries in this region, India was the second best after Sri Lanka. Now it is the second worst," the Nobel Laureate said.
"And because of Pakistan's problems, Pakistan has managed to shield us from being the worst," he added.
He added that while Indians should take pride in the achievements of the country, they must also be critical of things which are reasons to be ashamed of. "Despite the easy prominence of backwardness in India... now if you try to draw attention to that, the way to deflect it is to say: now think about the great pride of India," Sen said.
Dreze, who co-authored the book with Sen, said while India has become the fastest growing economy in the past few years - "helped partly by slowdown in China's growth and partly by some jugglery of numbers" - growth and development are not the same thing. He said that economic growth is the medium to achieve the goal that is development.
"And it's something to think about that despite 7 per cent GDP growth, the income of the rural labourer has remained the same and yet no one speaks about it," he said.
He added that while economic growth can help in achieving development, it needs to be accompanied by public action.
"If we talk about health, India is way behind even Bangladesh despite being economically ahead of it. And that is because of lack of public action in India compared to Bangladesh. Similarly public action is crucial for education, nutrition, social security, ensuring equality, and environmental protection," Dreze said.
then there was an uproar . . .
Jul 15, 2018
New Delhi: Days after Amartya Sen lamented that India has taken a quantum jump backwards since 2014, NITI Aayog Vice-Chairman Rajiv Kumar on Sunday said the Nobel laureate should spend some time in the country to see the structural reforms undertaken by the Modi government.
"I wish professor Amartya Sen would spend some time in India and actually look at conditions on the ground. At least review all the work that has been done in the past four years by the Modi government before making such statements," Kumar told PTI in an interview.
He was responding to a query regarding Sen's recent remarks about the present government. "I actually would like to challenge him to show me another period of four years where so much work has been done to make India cleaner, more inclusive and a more caring economy," Kumar said.
According to the NITI Aayog vice-chairman, the structural reforms introduced are ensuring that benefits of growth reach every last person. "If these things are not clear to him, then I think he should spend some time here," Kumar added.
On 10 July, while speaking at the launch of Bharat aur Uske Virodhabhas — the Hindi edition of his book An Uncertain Glory: India and its Contradictions — Sen had said that India was now the second-worst in the region as the country was moving backwards. "Things have gone pretty badly wrong... It has taken a quantum jump in the wrong direction since 2014. We are moving backwards in the fastest-growing economy... Now, India is the second-worst. Pakistan has managed to shield us from being the worst.
Propaganda, opinion or poison?
Anirban Ganguly's opinion piece (see below) for the Millennium Post does not include any declaration of his partisan allegiances whilst rubbishing the work and reputation of an Indian and trans-national Nobel Prize laureate. Is this is a crude political effort to suppress a reasoned critique? If so, why? Are the BJP, whilst engaging in a populist, nationalistic and religiously confrontational politics, in denial of the truth?
The migratory intellectual bird that goes by the name of Amartya Sen is back in India on his annual peregrination. The only way in which Sen thinks he can keep himself relevant and in circulation in the high circles of dilettantism is by undertaking an annual 'pilgrimage' to India at the behest of his powerful backers and myopic disciples – foremost among them, Martha Nussbaum, an US-based academic whose understanding of India has been influenced and shaped by her hatred for Narendra Modi and the BJP – and by giving interviews and addressing public events in which he abuses Modi, his government while arguing how India is gradually sliding into perdition. This keeps Sen's backers in the West happy, his sponsors active and gives a fresh lease of life and hope to his depleting constituency of followers in India.
For the last few years Sen, the failed prophet of the Nalanda University project – a project which he led and bled white by diverting resources from it to fund his junkets and meetings in exotic locales – has followed this trajectory. Come winter or monsoon, Sen is in India to caution Indians, whom he had dumped long ago for a career in the West, against electing Narendra Modi once again. That Sen can still come to India, address public events and go on television to dish out homilies without batting an eyelid, after being one of the kingpins of the scam that had bogged down the dream project of reviving the Nalanda University, speaks volumes of his insensibility and self-obsessive arrogance.
Being unaccountable while splurging resources at the expense of the Indian taxpayers have been Sen's forte and that is why, each time the ministry which was shepherding the Nalanda project called for accounts and accountability, Sen threw a tantrum and spoke of how institutional autonomy was being hampered. In reality, what he passed off as institutional autonomy was essentially his self-arrogated right to hoodwink the system, cheat Indian public sentiment and try and subvert the system to suit his ideological propensities and personal agenda.
Over the years, ever since his early days when he would simultaneously kowtow to his communist comrades and the then big bosses of the Congress party, Sen has mastered this unique capacity of pleasing many masters, —masters who, for their own interests, would keep him engaged in order to make sure that Sen would keep working overtime to fit his economic theories to their political actions. However, this is something which Sen has failed to do in the case of Narendra Modi. Modi has never ingratiated himself to anyone, let alone to Sen, and what Sen says about Modi does not matter to the vast majority of Indians who have rooted for Modi's transformative narrative. Opposing Modi, denigrating and disparaging his efforts at trying to transform India, dishing out falsehood and half-truth about him and his worldview, spreading hate and lie about the man, is what pumps adrenaline into Sen's veins, it keeps him going, it keeps the industry of self-seekers and rent-seekers that has grown around him well-oiled and keeps alive a narrative that is actually fast losing traction in young India and amongst the thinking mind. Young India has no time or patience for the harangues of an irrelevant and superannuated academic whose theories have failed under Indian conditions. Of course, one will never hear Amartya Sen speak of the imbecility of Shariat Courts in a democratic and constitutional set up such as India. Criticising such moves may prove detrimental to his niche back in the West, one will never hear him criticise the trafficking of children indulged in by a section of the Missionaries of Charity, doing so would most certainly compromise his self-styled messianic position in Western academia, Sen will also not take the Congress leadership to task for continuously trying to fan the flames of caste conflagration across the country for that would deprive him of the largesse of the Congress dynasty and would surely dent his false aura and close a number of avenues in India. Amartya Sen's strategic and selective silence on the many issues that are in reality a challenge to the effort to transform India reeks of intellectual opportunism and charlatanism, it projects him as a dishonest intellectual whose only interest is self-aggrandisement and whose only agenda is to peddle a divisive agenda. Knowing full well the multi-dimensional agenda that Modi is pursuing in empowering and mainstreaming the marginal sections of our society, Sen keeps quiet or peddles falsehood because that will keep the pot of his insidious broth boiling and full. He hates Modi because Modi had come up the hard way despite the likes of Sen trying to stymie his chances of leading India. However, Sen's intellectual dishonesty pales before Modi's drive and determination to transform India. Sen's insidious propaganda is increasingly falling on deaf ears. The new India, young India, the India that is aspiring to transform itself has no real interest or time for Sen's senseless prattle.
(The author is Director, Dr Syama Prasad Mookerjee Research Foundation, New Delhi. The views expressed are strictly personal)
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